The Pennsylvania Alliance for Design of Open Textbooks (PA-ADOPT) is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our ninth free and open eTextbook: The Digital Storytelling Handbook by Dr. Jordan Schugar, Professor of English, and Dr. Chris Penny, Professor of Educational Foundations & Policy Studies, at West Chester University (WCU). Other contributors include Hannah Glatt, Learning Experience and eTextbook Designer, and Autumn Hudson, Tu Le, Sarah Mangano, and Victoria McQuiston, Graduate Students at WCU.
“The Digital Storytelling Handbook is designed to provide an introduction to digital storytelling and its multifaceted applications in the higher education classroom space. This eTextbook gives storytellers practical tools to help them think about different reasons for making digital stories and different ways to think about using and incorporating digital stories into teaching, learning, and living. In this eTextbook, readers will also learn how experiencing digital stories — as either the author or the audience — builds cultural competence and teaches us about humanity and the human experience. Co-authored with students, this eTextbook was written in the spirit of OER with the expectation that future readers and students have an opportunity to contribute a chapter, idea, approach, or methodology of the eTextbook’s basic content.”
Hudson, Le, Mangano, and McQuiston were all students in Dr. Penny’s EDT 530: Digital Media Production and Storytelling course during the Spring 2024 semester. In this course, students participated in the development of an Open Educational Resource (OER) utilizing an approach known as Open Pedagogy. As explained by the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, it is “the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. It’s a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. The products of open pedagogy are student created and openly licensed so that they may live outside of the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community.” This is the first PA-ADOPT eTextbook to utilize Open Pedagogy.
Please help us spread the word about our books and web site to further our work to reduce costs for students, bring equity to higher education classrooms, and give faculty the flexibility to design their own learning experiences. All of our books are available to download in both ePub and PDF formats from our Bookshelf.